


Sic Gorgiamus Allos Subjectatos Nunc

by etothepii



Series: Sic Gorgiamus Allos Subjectatos Nunc [1]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-03-29
Updated: 2011-03-29
Packaged: 2017-10-19 07:29:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,704
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/198422
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/etothepii/pseuds/etothepii
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"<i>Sic gorgiamus allos subjectatos nunc</i>. It's the family motto." "What does it mean?" "We gladly feast on those who would subdue us."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sic Gorgiamus Allos Subjectatos Nunc

**Author's Note:**

> Crossover with The Addams Family. Followed by [Woe and Arachnids](http://etothepii.livejournal.com/11286.html) and [Your Body Before Me](http://etothepii.livejournal.com/12722.html).

John is born not in hospital, but at home, with a distant cousin on his mother's side acting as midwife. When it happens and he is finally expelled from his mother's body, the midwife picks him up before he can draw his first breath. She submerges him in the small tub at her side, filled nearly to the brim with warm blood -- hers, his mother's, and the rest belonging to a freshly-butchered boar.

When the midwife retrieves him from the tub, he gives a hearty wail. She uses a cloth to wipe his face clean. Blood dribbles out his mouth and nose, and his arms flail clumsily.

"A healthy baby boy," she says, and brings him close enough for his mother to briefly touch her fingers to his cheek before another contraction wracks her body. She places him back in the tub. "And now for the next."

His sister Harriet is born seven minutes afterwards.

\--

Until they are too old to fit comfortably, his mother puts he and Harry in the washing machine for their baths -- not all the time, but sometimes, when there are also clothes to be washed. When she takes them out after the spin cycle, they giggle with delight and blow bubbles in the air.

She puts them in the dryer once too, but only once because afterwards Harry had had a rash from the fabric softener and John's hair had stuck out uncontrollably.

John doesn't remember very much about it -- only that it happened, only that he remembers his father telling the judge once during the trial that he'd seen John playing in the machine with the dirty clothes, where anything could have happened if his mother had been careless.

She hadn't been careless. She'd kissed the top of his head and told him to have fun. Then, she'd closed the lid and turned on the machine. John had spent the wash cycle pretending he could fly.

\--

John and Harry are five when they find the drain cleaner underneath the kitchen sink. It takes a little while to work the cap open but they manage it eventually. The liquid looks a lot like paint so they spill it on the floor and put their hands in it. It tastes funny, like something they've never tasted before, but not _bad_ , just funny. It buzzes like a bee in his mouth and his teeth even after he swallows.

Most of the bottle is gone when their father comes home from work and finds them, clothes ruined and giggling. The thick liquid coats their hands and faces.

He yells at them, face turning a bright, blotchy red. He wants to know where Mummy is, and what they're doing, and tells them to never, _ever_ play with the things under the sink again. John cries out when his father grabs him too hard while carrying them to the bath tub, where he rinses them both, roughly, with cold water.

It gets in his nose and in his mouth, just enough to make him choke but not enough for him to breathe it. Harry bites when it's her turn, and she gets sent to her room (but it's John's room too, so they both go to keep her from getting bored).

Their parents have a huge row. Their father throws things and calls their mother _careless_. He says she doesn't care for them properly, while their mother repeats, "Nothing bad happened. They're fine," as if it will soothe his temper. It doesn't.

"What's _wrong_ with you?" he demands. "You have to look after them! They're just children! They'll get hurt!"

Afterwards, their mother hugs them and tells them not to cry, that Papa was just worried about them, that's all.

"Why is he mad?" Harry asks, when their mother tucks them in.

She kisses Harry on the forehead, and then John.

"I'll explain to you when you're older," she says.

\--

Their father works but Mummy doesn't, so she is the one they go to when they manage to find the kitchen knives and John cuts off three fingers from Harry's right hand but can't figure out how to put them back.

"Mummy!" Harry wails, throwing herself at their mother's skirts, her severed fingers clutched in her other hand. Each one is curled, clinging tightly to her fist. She waves her right hand at their mother. "Look what Johnny did!"

Their mother kneels down and holds her hand out for Harry's fingers, which she drops in her palm. "Johnny," she says sternly, and blows first on the red ends of the fingers, then on the stumps on Harry's hand. "That wasn't very nice. What would you have done if you'd lost one of them, hmm?"

"But she pushed me down the stairs," John pouts.

"So you push her down the stairs back. You don't cut off her fingers and then leave them like that," she scolds, and then soothingly to Harry. "Pay attention, Harry. You had them in the wrong order. See? The short one is your pinky finger. It goes here," she says, and presses the shortest finger against the stump furthest from the rest of her fingers. "And the long one is your middle finger. It goes in the middle of all your fingers, _here_ , and the left-over one is your ring finger. It goes here," placing each finger in the appropriate place.

When she's done, Harry flexes her reattached fingers and sticks her tongue out at John.

John blows her a raspberry. To their mother, he says, "Show me again!"

"Promise not to tell your father," she warns. When they both nod enthusiastically, she takes them to the bathroom and teaches John how to cut off a hand with one swing of the cleaver. And she shows the both of them how to, even with their eyes closed, walk a hand or finger back to themselves without getting lost.

\--

No one likes them when they go to school. They get called names like _Freak_ and _Skellyton_ , and made fun of when they sit next to each other at lunch and share sandwiches cut to look like bats and caudrons.

One of the boys pushes Harry down, then throws sand at her hair.

It's something John does all the time (only with rocks instead of sand), but he's the _only_ one allowed to do that. Out here, an attack on her is an attack on him. So he tackles the boy to the ground and wrestles him down, using his teeth and nails and snarling like a wolverine. Harry stabs a stick into his leg as deep as it will go.

The boy howls and John growls like a dog. He catches a big bite of the boy's shoulder in his teeth and shakes his head from side to side like he sees dogs do on the telly. "Rrrr," he growls.

But the boy starts crying. The hole in his trousers turns red. The redness keeps coming too, leaking out from where the stick pierces his skin, getting worse when Harry twists the stick. A teacher comes, and she raises her hands to her mouth, her face going white.

They get in a lot of trouble for that, even though John doesn't know why. They were only playing. But when their parents get there, their father's mad -- really mad, his arms trembling with anger, and their mother's pale, lips pressed tightly together.

"We were only playing," Harry protests when they arrive. "He started it!"

"We'll talk about this later Harry, John," his mother says, and gives them a stern look.

A serious-faced man tries to talk to John and Harry, wanting to know what they do at home, wanting to know where John learned to fight like that. When they spend more time looking at each other than at him, he separates them.

"How are things at home?" he asks, when John is by himself and squirming in the chair, bored.

"They're good," he says. "Can I go now?"

"You really hurt someone today, John," the man continues. "Do you know what you did?"

John shrugs. "Dunno."

"It's not good to bite people. Do you feel the need to bite people a lot?"

John shrugs again, and kicks his feet against the floor. "Dunno."

"Do your parents get mad a lot?"

John shakes his head. "Papa does, but not Mummy."

"What happens when Papa gets mad?"

Shrug. "Dunno. Can I go now?"

\--

When they get home, their father storms out to go to the pub. "This is your fault, letting the kids watch those horrible things on the telly," he says to their mother before slams the door shut. "You handle it."

 _They're not like us,_ their mother whispers to them.

"There was a lot of blood," Harry says, and John nods, because he'd been thinking the same thing.

"It never looks like that when Harry does it to me," he offers. The blood never runs out from his body when he slices it open. They'd used a knife, just the other day, to open up his belly and watch his insides glisten and pulse. It'd tickled, and they'd spent several minutes poking at his insides to see what happened. The game had broken down when Harry tried to put a rock in him and he'd responded by kicking her in the face.

"I know, baby," she says, and strokes their heads, holding them close to her. "But you can't play like that with the other kids. They don't know how."

"Can't we teach them?" John asks.

"No," his mother replies. "Just be gentle."

\--

They are eight when their father catches their mother pouring rat poison into two bowls of chicken soup while John and Harry are sick with the flu. He knocks them from the table, grabbing her wrists tightly enough to bruise on a normal person.

They're too ill to sneak out of bed to eavesdrop, so all they hear is the yelling. Their father yells at their mother a lot (all the time, when he gets home and they haven't put their toys away fast enough), but she never yells back.

"It's okay," John says to Harry, because he's the older one, he's the _big brother_ , and climbs out of his bed to crawl into hers and hook their fingers together.

But it isn't okay, because after that, people come -- solemn-faced grown-ups that have hushed conversations with their father. There's a tension in the air that makes it hard to breathe. Their father tucks them into bed at night instead of their mother and he does it all wrong. He even forgets to kiss them goodnight.

Their Uncle James comes to stay with them for a while and help their mother look after them. John doesn't like it. Mummy never follows them when they go play, and _she'd_ always let them outside to play in the woods.

He catches them when they pull a chair to the kitchen counter to reach the knives. He gets mad and drags them, struggling, to their mother.

"I caught them trying to get at the knives," he says. Their mother looks up from the table. She's writing a letter.

"So? They just want to play," she says. "I'm sure they'll be careful, right children?"

John and Harry nod. "Yes, Mummy," they say in unison.

But they end up not being allowed to play with the knives, because Uncle James gets a serious expression on his face and takes their mummy off to the side, where they speak too quietly for John to hear. When they come back, their mummy gives them a strained smile and says, "Perhaps not, my lovelies."

They can't do _anything_ interesting, because whenever they try, Uncle James is there, taking things away and getting more and more mad until he finally sends them to their room.

\--

Then there is a trial, and a judge.

But John and Harry are eight, still eight, and all they really know about it is that their mother's going away and she can't see them anymore even though she loves them very much.

John overhears his father on the phone, and he hears the words _crazy_ , and _sick_. When he asks about it, his father crouches down to look him in the eye and puts his large hands on John's shoulders and says, "Mummy's very sick, John, and she's not good to be around right now, so she's going away."

"But I don't want her to go away," John says, and starts to cry.

He knows, already, that it has to do with the secrets his mother keeps from his father, about the way she teaches he and Harry things. It's in the way she taps their noses and says, "But don't tell Papa" after she shows them how to use pins to hold open the skin on their bellies so they can use their hands when they look inside.

 _They don't know how,_ she'd said, and John had thought she only meant the other kids at school, but she means their father too.

\--

It's not actually the end of the world. Their mum doesn't live with them anymore but she still writes to them. She writes long, rambling letters filled with stories about her childhood that their father says are fairy tales but that John and Harry know are true.

But their dad reads her letters to them and corrects the spelling on theirs to her, so there is never the opportunity to ask outright, _We know we're different from other kids? How, why, and what should we do?_

She calls them, on their birthday and Christmas. It's never for long, only long enough for John and Harry to take turns, each of them saying "I love you" and "I miss you" and getting the same in return.

\--

Their father doesn't like them very much.

John likes cutting things open. Mostly, he plays with just himself and Harry, but he finds the neighbor's dog once. Harry helps him hold him down while he peels away his skin and pokes at his lungs; the dog stops struggling after the first cut, because that's when they always stop trying to get away, when they go still and glassy-eyed and passive under the knife.

John asks for scalpels for Christmas and his father buys him a jumper instead.

On their birthday, Harry says, "May we have arsenic on our cake, please?" as nice and polite as she can because their mother had always sprinkled some on top of their slices. Their father laughs and puts ground up bits of biscuit over the top of her slice instead, which _isn't the same at all_. It doesn't even taste like arsenic.

The neighbor's dog goes missing later, weeks after they'd already looked at all its organs and compared them to Harry's. They'd closed it back up and let it eat half of John's sandwich, because their mother always says to be nice to things after they play with them. When they'd let it back on the street where they'd found him, he'd had a bow from one of Harry's Christmas presents on his head and had snuffled John's pockets, looking for more sandwiches.

Their father finds the knives they used, hidden under John's bed. They still have a little smudge of blood and fur on them.

He goes white and then red and throws John's tools on the table and demands to know what they did.

John thinks that probably they should lie, because this is one of the secrets they kept from their father, but Harry doesn't see it yet, doesn't know _why_ she has to hide it, so she tells him the truth. She tells him that they found the dog on the street and she held him while John cut him open (they were just looking, they weren't going to take anything out).

He gets angry and shakes her hard enough that John can hear her teeth click together, and tells them to never, _ever_ do it again, that it's bad and evil and wrong. Harry starts to cry, because it's not wrong, because their mother said it was okay, except that when their father hears that it just makes things _worse_.

\--

"We have to be normal," John tells her that night, when they have been sent to bed without supper. "Mummy's not here anymore, and we're not normal, and if anyone finds out, we'll be in a lot of trouble."

"I don't want to be normal," Harry says. "Normal's boring and stupid."

"If we don't, he might send us away too," John says. "And we won't be together anymore."

"But I don't want to," Harry repeats. Her eyes glow a little bit in the dark so she can see him, but John's aren't on. All he sees is the glow of her eyes, and the way they flicker when she blinks.

"We can't let him know. He found out about Mummy, and he _sent her away_ ," John says. "We can't."

"I hate him," Harry says. She squeezes her eyes shut tightly. " _I hate him_. I wish he was the one sent away instead."

She's crying in earnest now, sobbing like they'd done when they'd last seen their mother, when she'd hugged them and told them to be good for their father and not to worry about her, she'd see them when she could.

John crawls out of his bed to hug her. "It's only for a little bit," he promises. "Until we grow up."

\--

"Do you think we should be more like normal kids?" John asks, when their mum next calls. "Will we be in trouble if we aren't?"

There is a long silence on the other line, where John can clearly hear the sound of wind, wailing and howling. She says, "I don't want you to change who you are, Johnny. I'll love you both no matter what happens. But," and there is another pause, "I think it might be for the best, for you and Harry."

John bites his lip. "Okay. Can you tell her that too?" he asks, and passes the phone to Harry.

Afterwards, when they're alone, Harry bumps his shoulder with hers and says, "Fine, but only in front of other people. Not when it's just us, right?"

"Right."

\--

Being normal isn't hard. He watches the telly and his classmates to learn what is and isn't normal and figures it out most of the time.

Normal people can't see in the dark.

Normal people can't breathe underwater.

Normal people can't move things without touching them. John can't either without giving himself a headache, but Harry's pretty decent at it with small things. Mostly she uses it to knot his shoelaces together.

Normal people bleed when they get cut. They experiment with this one very carefully, in the bathroom with just a tiny cut on their palms, until John can slice open his palm and let blood well up, bringing with it pain he hasn't felt before. It scares him. It scares Harry too, and once they figure out how to do it, they don't do it again.

Normal people don't cut or burn or electrocute other people.

Normal people can't turn their pain off.

Normal people don't play doctor by opening up the abdominal cavity (John wonders what they _do_ do, then).

Normal people, when they play with animals, don't use scalpels.

Normal people can't eat poisons without getting sick. (John doesn't realize arsenic isn't a type of spice until he's twelve.)

Normal girls don't like other girls, and normal boys don't like other boys. (They learn, when they're fifteen, that this one is a lie and subsequently disregard it.)

Normal comes easier to John than it does to Harry. It's not so bad, really, because the things boys do are still fun, even if they're not _as_ fun. He makes some friends of his own, kids who will sit with him during lunch and talk to him about homework or books.

But Harry hasn't got any friends but him, and she has no interest in talking about boys or makeup. She wants to see how bright her eyes can glow, how heavy the things she can lift without touching are, and what will happen if she gets a tattoo and John carves it off. She likes cigarettes because they're poisonous and knives because they're sharp. People are _afraid_ of her.

They're not afraid of John anymore, not now that he wears fluffy jumpers and hasn't stabbed anyone in front of a teacher in almost a decade. They've forgotten that he and Harry are twins, that they have the same blood. They've forgotten they ought to be afraid of John, too.

It makes him feel like a shark swimming just beneath the surface of the water.

He likes that.

\--

John's pretty sure his father loves them in his own way, but Harry has sworn she'll never stop hating him for sending their mother away. Even John has trouble with that, because every time something happens -- every time he thinks, _am I supposed to be scared when someone hits me,_ or _can I put antifreeze in my drink without anyone noticing_ , it's followed by a hollowness in his chest where his mother should be.

She understands them. But she's not here anymore, except in the form of increasingly rare letters passed to John from his father.

When he finally finishes studying the anatomy book he checked out from the library, and Harry finally manages to trap a squirrel to go with the sparrow they caught two days ago, they go to John's bedroom and lock the door.

It turns out that a squirrel with wings on its back can't move the wings, which John suspected because of the missing muscles there, but it moves them just fine when he places them where the squirrel's front legs should be. When John cuts off the bottom half of its body to save on weight, it can even glide clumsily.

"We should keep them," Harry says. "And give them names."

"They're wild animals, not pets," John says as he puts their pieces in the right places. He strokes the sparrow with his fingertip and it jerks out of the silent, trance-like state it had been in while he worked. "Besides, Dad would get mad at us."

"Dad's always mad at us," Harry points out.

"Maybe we can ask for a dog instead. A proper pet," John says. "And it'd be tame too."

They ask and their father says no, because every time an animal goes missing in their neighborhood he _looks_ at them, like he thinks they're dangerous. Like he's afraid of them. He searches their rooms too, and John knows what he's looking for even if he's never outright asked them about it again. _Proof_ , but he won't find it. They've never killed anything bigger than a bug, not even by accident.

Harry hates it because it means their father is looking through her things, managing each time to find and confiscate the fags she gets from an older brother of one of John's mates. John hates it because it makes Harry cry.

He's already learned to hide his knives somewhere their father won't find them.

\--

Their father dies from a heart attack at the beginning of their second-last year at secondary school. Their mother's cousins offer to take them in, and no one else volunteers, so they go to America.

It's _brilliant_.

Grandmama (she's not really their grandmother, but that's what she tells them to call her) puts arsenic and nightshade and foxglove into the food, Thing is a disembodied hand (John asks him if he was born that way or if he just lost the rest of his body, and then realizes too late that he doesn't know sign language), and Aunt Morticia tells them where they can find the dungeons.

The house is _huge_ , a proper mansion, and on their first night there, cousins Wednesday and Pugsley sneak into John's room through a secret passage (a secret passage!) and wake him up by trying to stab him in the chest with an honest-to-god _spear_.

They succeed. John ends up with a gaping hole in his chest when he yanks it out, and Wednesday and Pugsley get told off for damaging his pajamas when he goes to their mother for another set. Harry grabs one of Wednesday's braids and threatens to cut it off if she doesn't apologize. Wednesday apologizes.

Uncle Gomez enrolls them in the local secondary school and suddenly they're _popular_ , because all the American girls think John's accent is cool and no one here knows about the time Harry got suspended from school for being caught snogging a girl, or the time John got sent to the headmaster's office for setting one of his classmate's clothes on fire.

Aunt Morticia teaches them how to see the spindly, long-legged creatures that lurk in the spaces where things aren't. Harry spends a lot of time talking to them, until they cluster around her when she looks for them, scratching at her feet like happy puppies eager to do her will. They listen to John too, but not as eagerly, not as willingly.

\--

Wednesday and Pugsley are only twelve, but Harry asks the important question, which is, "How long have you been twelve?"

"A while," Wednesday says.

"Why?" John asks. "Do you like being twelve?" and she doesn't have an answer.

\--

Harry gets caught snogging a girl, again, but this time when she comes home in tears, Aunt Morticia tuts in concern when she hears the reason and lets Harry take her dinner in her room without complaint.

John goes to Harry's room afterwards, to check if she's all right. Wednesday is already there, seated cross-legged at the foot of the bed. She and Harry stop talking when John knocks and opens the door. There is a voodoo doll stuck with several sharp pins on the bed between them. Harry shifts aside to make room for John. She pats the spot next to her, and smiles when John sits down.

"Tell him," she says to Wednesday.

" _Sic gorgiamus allos subjectatos nunc_. It's the family motto."

"What does it mean?" John asks.

"We gladly feast on those who would subdue us," she says, and teaches them how they'll get their revenge.

\--

"There's no need to leave so soon," Aunt Morticia says when John starts getting the acceptance letters from unis. "You're welcome to stay as long as you wish. You have so much more to learn."

John knows that, but he misses Britain so much it's nearly a physical pain. He wants to go home even more than he wants to learn about the darker, hidden part of himself he's never truly gotten to know. He wants to be a doctor. He wants to be a surgeon and cut open real people, and watch the blood well up in a way that doesn't happen at any other time.

He tells people he wants to maybe be a soldier, which is also true, because everything is safe here. No one can get hurt. No one dies. A part of him that only he and Harry know about wants to watch the flare of fear in a man's eyes before their spark of life fades into nothingness.

So, army.

He turns eighteen and when term starts, he goes home to Britain.

But Harry likes the States so much that she stays seventeen for another three years.

\--

In Afghanistan, sometimes he can save people that aren't meant to be saved.

When no one's looking, there are things he can do. He can _fix_ people. There's a trick to it, a way of bending his thoughts, where he slices a bullet hole wider and it becomes not a wound but an incision.

He's never had trouble closing up incisions.

The hard part is making himself seem normal.

The hard part is suppressing whatever's inside him that means he can decapitate a cat and lizard and graft their heads onto the body of a dog to make a truly awkward chimera that, when he pulls apart the stitches and pushes the heads back on the appropriate bodies, lets the animals themselves get up with no signs of harm.

He only cheats sometimes, not too often. He does it when the patient's in too much shock to notice, when there are no other survivors. He does it when it's just him, a soldier, the remains of a land mine, and the words "I'm not going to make it -- I can't feel my legs," followed by John muttering,

"Just close your eyes. Go to sleep, you'll be fine," as he takes nature and turns it on its head. He does things that even he shouldn't be able to do. He knows what he can do isn't meant to be used for healing, but he _does it anyway_ out of sheer force of will.

But wounds aren't supposed to heal in minutes, which means most of the time he has to hold back and leave the wound open and bleeding, edges stitched together but healing with the slow crawl of nature. Sometimes, it leads to scars and infections and all those ugly, _real_ things that never happened when he was peeling back the skin on Harry's hand to look at her bones. Other times, it leads to death.

That's the part he hates the most.

\--

His unit thinks he's lucky because he's never been hit, only had a few close calls. In reality, he's been hit several times. Each time feels like getting punched, a firm burst of pressure against his body. But that's all it is, a quick burst of pressure. Afterwards when he gets some time alone, he cuts the deformed bullet out of his body and neatly stitches the hole in his uniform shut.

Only, this time he's shot and it _burns_ , it _hurts_ , even after he's turned off the pain, even after he makes himself cold and lets the color leech from the world. It's like nothing he's ever felt before, sharp lances of pain that originate in his shoulder but stab deeper, spreading out until he's seeing stars and gasping desperately for air.

The wound gets infected, swells and burns. It leaves him feverish and delirious for weeks and gets him invalided home. It heals slowly, as slowly as a normal person's. When it's finally over, he has a rough, puckered scar on his shoulder and a new nightmare to join the others at night.

One of his mates gives him the bullet they dug out of his shoulder. When John picks it up, his fingertips tingle strangely, as if he's picked up a hot coal. There's something scratched into the metal, but it's too smudged and damaged for him to make out what it is.

When John asks about it, Bill rubs his thumb over the bullet and says, "Sometimes the Afghans bless their bullets. For luck."

\--

When she first meets Sherlock in person, Harry is -- well, she's _sort_ of drunk, but not on alcohol. Drunk on emotion, mostly, the free-flowing hum of feelings that most people wear around them like a cloak. She'd probably gone somewhere crowded and just stayed for a while, pulling in the feelings of everyone around her, until the world went vivid and intense.

John has his vision turned on, just a bit. It's not enough to make his eyes glow, but it lets him see the little shadowy creatures that hover around her, sipping from the power that leaks out her pores.

"John, I need you to --" Sherlock stops short at the sight of Harry and John on the sofa. "Ah," he says. "Dinner with Clara didn't go well?"

Harry sniffles. "No, it didn't," she says.

She had just been telling John about it. Clara had wanted to get back together, and Harry still loved her, but. But she couldn't, because Clara didn't know -- about any of it. About their mother, or Harry's pets (that's what he calls them in his head; he doesn't know if they have proper names), or why Harry's not afraid of knives or poison or spiders.

"You care for her still, but you don't --" Sherlock begins, but stops when John shoots him a fierce glare.

"Shut up," John says, and wraps an arm around his sister. It dislodges several of her pets. They hover in the air, waiting for her to get comfortable before settling back on her and his arm. It leaves several barely noticeable pinpricks of emptiness over the skin, not the absence of touch but the _opposite_ of it. "Not the time, Sherlock."

"Right," Sherlock says, with a slight change in his voice that John recognizes intimately. Getting the right words to say, but not knowing why. "My apologies, Harriet."

She shakes her head. "It's fine. I'm not -- I'm okay." She raises her head to look at him and then stops, staring.

John knows what she sees. They'd learned, when they were children, how to tell the difference between themselves and everyone else. Because in the right light, and with the right eyes, John can look at Harry and see _it_ , the slight otherness about her that sets her apart.

Sherlock doesn't have it (neither does Mycroft, but it had taken John three months to realize that).

"Anyway," she says, wiping her eyes one final time and standing up, only slightly wobbly. "I should probably be getting home."

Outside, while they are waiting together for a cab, she nudges John with her shoulder and says, "He's very... normal, isn't he?"

John thinks about it. He compares frozen heads (that don't talk) in the fridge to disembodied hands that sleep in boxes, and violin music at three in the morning to things made of darkness that sometimes do your bidding, if you're willing to shed a little blood.

He thinks about breathing underwater and studying in med school with a sharp knife and locked door, about arsenic and chimeras and Wake the Dead. He thinks about shooting a cabbie from across the street and being kidnapped by Chinese smugglers, about bombs and swimming pools and the smell of chlorine.

It's not that different.

"Not in the ways that matter," John says.  


**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Usopp's Birth](https://archiveofourown.org/works/531860) by [Shinju_Tori_Archives (Shinju_Tori)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Shinju_Tori/pseuds/Shinju_Tori_Archives)
  * [[Podfic] Sic Gorgiamus Allos Subjectatos Nunc](https://archiveofourown.org/works/1399801) by [araline](https://archiveofourown.org/users/araline/pseuds/araline)
  * [Halogen](https://archiveofourown.org/works/3075065) by [Azur](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Azur/pseuds/Azur)
  * [An Ordinary Man](https://archiveofourown.org/works/9243416) by [fabricdragon](https://archiveofourown.org/users/fabricdragon/pseuds/fabricdragon)




End file.
